Preserving the Past
BOYERS — A short film documentary brings to light a photograph archive stored 220 feet below ground in Butler County.
The Bettmann Archive is stored in the Corbis Film Preservation Facility at Iron Mountain, 1137 Branchton Road.
Corbis is owned by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The company's assets include the archive, which is said to contain 19 million historically important images.
The documentary
“The Invisible Photograph,” shown last month at the Film Kitchen screening series in Pittsburgh, focused on the image archive. The series features regional, independently made short films and videos.
Film producer and cameraman David D'Agostino, commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art, said, “I heard rumors that there was a cave in the Butler area where they hid politicians during 9-11. I also knew about the Corbis-Bettmann Archive but didn't know it was in Pennsylvania.”
Accessing the Corbis facility was an unusual experience for the filmmakers.Iron Mountain is housed in a former limestone mine. It offers record management and document storage services, and security is tight because government agencies store records there.“I was most surprised at how quickly you forget you are over 200 feet underground, with only one exit, controlled by armed guards. I tried as a filmmaker to emphasize the feeling of a science fiction film, but the amount of visual history in the Bettmann Archive is far more impressive than the shock factor of the mine,” said D'Agostino.“Once past the armed guards, and safe in the hands of collections manager Ann Hartman, the archive is an incredibly hospitable and accessible environment. It's pretty normal, as far as office environments go, aside from the rock walls. The coffee is still bad and the carpet is still brown,” said D'Agostino.“The science fiction feeling really came after walking through the airlock into a giant refrigerator containing our visual history as earthlings, neatly alphabetized into hundreds of beige file cabinets,” he said.The archive began as the contents of two trunks Otto Bettmann took with him when he left Nazi Germany for the United States in 1935. Bettmann worked as a librarian in Berlin where he developed the idea of creating a photo archive. Images of U.S. history included in it date to the Civil War.The collection grew over the years with the eventual merger with the news photo library of United Press International.The collection contains such iconic images as Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue and Rosa Parks seated in the front of a bus.Today, archive images are available for licensing online at www.corbisimages.com.Filmmaker D'Agostino said, “Anyone can go online and type in a keyword and be overloaded with tons of images. But there is something very different about the printed physical image that somehow makes it more, I don't know, actualized — there is probably a German word to describe it.”“You can go to their website, type in a word, for example; justice, or obese, or abnormality, or whatever, and it will lead to a physical thing that you can hold. And not just one image but any variety of images that are only connected by a keyword,” he said.“It's a site for inspiring creativity and showcasing incredible images,” said Hartman, senior manager, library and records management at the archive. “People have access to and use images from the Corbis website.”
Archive images are licensed for use as book illustrations and covers, magazines and television shows and movies.Hartman said, “When the movie 'Gangs of New York' was being made, they asked us for scenes of Boss Tweed's gang at Five Points to get the look of the streets and clothing.”“Every day we look for images for clients,” she said. The archive gets 30 or more requests a week for images and about 150 are scanned.The physical sources of those images are in Corbis' climate-controlled vault.It's estimated the archive holds 19 million photographs, negatives and glass plates, as well as other images, according to Hartman.“Sure you can Google it, but to hold, for example, the original 35-mm strip of film exposed to the light from a battle scene in Vietnam, I guess I knew this, but being there, holding these images, I realized how important it is to preserve them,” D'Agostino said.“Something about seeing an image on a glowing computer screen removes you from the image,” D'Agostino said.
The preservation needs of the archive require Hartman and Corbis production control coordinators Leslie Stauffer and Sarah Kubiak work in a sunless environment.“It's entertaining to say the least,” said Stauffer. “It's also dark. We don't get a lot of sunlight down here, but the collection is amazing.”“We have these Verilux lights to get the vitamin D that you don't get,” said Stauffer.Kubiak said tracking down an image using the archive's vast filing system can prove a challenge. The collection, before coming into Corbis' hands, used to lend out negatives and plates and didn't always have them returned.“They are lost to the ages,” said Kubiak. “We are very meticulous with our filing.”Hartman said the airlock-equipped vault storing the physical sources of the archive images is 10,000 square feet and kept at 45 degrees and 35 percent humidity. These conditions preserve aging film stock.All photo materials degrade: emulsions fade, flake and peel; plastic film base can either liquify or dry out; and cellulose acetate — the most common film base — releases acetic acid as it decays which shrinks or distorts images.The Corbis facility doesn't have running water because of the danger a burst pipe would pose to the materials, said Hartman, who has been with the archive since it moved underground in Boyers in 2002.
Usually only a handful of non-Corbis researchers visit the preservation facility, but the documentary filmmakers weren't there to seek images but to create them.“I like to know what makes a person tick. At one point, Jeffrey Inscho, Carnegie Museum of Art's Web and digital media manager, was having a fantastic conversation with ... Stauffer, and I just started rolling the camera,” said film producer D'Agostino.“She was self conscious around the camera, but once we started rolling, she was already so passionately involved in the conversation, she forgot about the camera,” D'Agostino said.The Boyers location made the documentary perfect fare for Film Kitchen, said Matthew Day, curator of the film series.“Everything screened in Film Kitchen has a local connection. Movies are either made in the region or by talented artists with a Pittsburgh connection,” said Day. Film Kitchen is held the second Tuesday of each month at Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Melwood Screening Room, 477 Melwood Ave. in Pittsburgh's Oakland section.When asked if there were plans to expand the archive film into a full-fledged documentary, D'Agostino said, “The documentary belongs to the Carnegie Museum of Art. It is their project. You will have to ask them. Personally, I would love to have made the film longer.”“The museum wanted it only to be 5 to 10 minutes and said the Web audience would not watch the video if it was longer. I insisted on the length.“I will say however, a feature-length video about an archive could get a little slow without any romantic scenes, or at least a little gunfire,” he said.
